The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Studies in Pessimism eBook

when we are occupied with some purely intellectual
interest—­when in reality we have stepped
forth from life to look upon it from the outside, much
after the manner of spectators at a play. And
even sensual pleasure itself means nothing but a struggle
and aspiration, ceasing the moment its aim is attained.
Whenever we are not occupied in one of these ways,
but cast upon existence itself, its vain and worthless
nature is brought home to us; and this is what we
mean by boredom. The hankering after what is
strange and uncommon—­an innate and ineradicable
tendency of human nature—­shows how glad
we are at any interruption of that natural course
of affairs which is so very tedious.

That this most perfect manifestation of the will to
live, the human organism, with the cunning and complex
working of its machinery, must fall to dust and yield
up itself and all its strivings to extinction—­this
is the naive way in which Nature, who is always so
true and sincere in what she says, proclaims the whole
struggle of this will as in its very essence barren
and unprofitable. Were it of any value in itself,
anything unconditioned and absolute, it could not
thus end in mere nothing.

If we turn from contemplating the world as a whole,
and, in particular, the generations of men as they
live their little hour of mock-existence and then
are swept away in rapid succession; if we turn from
this, and look at life in its small details, as presented,
say, in a comedy, how ridiculous it all seems!
It is like a drop of water seen through a microscope,
a single drop teeming with infusoria; or a
speck of cheese full of mites invisible to the naked
eye. How we laugh as they bustle about so eagerly,
and struggle with one another in so tiny a space!
And whether here, or in the little span of human life,
this terrible activity produces a comic effect.

It is only in the microscope that our life looks so
big. It is an indivisible point, drawn out and
magnified by the powerful lenses of Time and Space.

ON SUICIDE.

As far as I know, none but the votaries of monotheistic,
that is to say, Jewish religions, look upon suicide
as a crime. This is all the more striking, inasmuch
as neither in the Old nor in the New Testament is
there to be found any prohibition or positive disapproval
of it; so that religious teachers are forced to base
their condemnation of suicide on philosophical grounds
of their own invention. These are so very bad
that writers of this kind endeavor to make up for the
weakness of their arguments by the strong terms in
which they express their abhorrence of the practice;
in other words, they declaim against it. They
tell us that suicide is the greatest piece of cowardice;
that only a madman could be guilty of it; and other
insipidities of the same kind; or else they make the
nonsensical remark that suicide is wrong; when
it is quite obvious that there is nothing in the world
to which every mail has a more unassailable title than
to his own life and person.